Invensys's Wonderware division today disclosed a new architectural framework that bundles its HMI, SCADA, MES, and manufacturing intelligence applications in a unified environment that company officials said will make it easier for customers to license and consistently deploy the software across dispersed plant operations.
Called the Wonderware System Platform, the architecture represents much more than a re-packaging of separate products into one bundle. Instead, the new offering, which is built on the company's ArchestrA integration framework, is a flexible production management system that allows a customer to pick and choose desired functions without incurring extra licensing costs.
System Platform ties together the company's Industrial Application Server, Industrial SQL Server historian, SuiteVoyager information server, and device integration components. On top of that, modules for equipment operations, equipment performance, manufacturing execution, and manufacturing intelligence can be added as needed, the company said.
"We are on the path to [simplifying] our product offerings and making them more intuitive," said Claus Abildgren, Wonderware's marketing program manager, in an interview with Managing Automation. "And we're restructuring ... to facilitate the process."
The issue, Abildgren said, is that manufacturers operate in a heterogeneous production environment. Meanwhile, more factories are dispersed around the world, making any improvement to global operations a challenge.
But the System Platform can alleviate the painful process of managing and maintaining diverse manufacturing operations, officials said. "Everything we do is around the real-time domain of manufacturing," Abildgren said. "We allow them to supervise and control physical processes and create a logical representation of physical processes in the IT system. This is called the plant model."
The plant model uses a common data model for traditional supervisory functions such as data collection, alarming, and performance analysis, which can also tie into the instruction set used to make products or assign a work order.
System Platform includes industrial domain services -- the features necessary for industrial applications -- like real-time communication and messaging, alarm and event management, and data-level security. Also included with the System Platform are device connectivity services, which leverage standards like OPC UA, XML, and Microsoft's .NET to connect to any PLC or DCS, and information and data management services that manage real-time and historical information.
Everything within the System Platform is bundled under one system license, which is a departure from Wonderware's traditional piecemeal approach, in which customers bought licenses on a per-product basis. The company said it could not put a price tag on the System Platform package because I/O count and the number of clients must be factored in.
Getting started, however, is easy, officials said. Wonderware's "QuickStart" CDs for the equipment performance and equipment utilization modules include pre-engineered examples of how to use the features. "By providing QuickStart and drag-and-drop, it takes out a significant amount of programming for the engineer," noted Abildgren, who said in some cases development time could be cut in half.
Additional QuickStart CDs will be available for future System Platform modules -- including an enterprise integration module, a batch execution module, a manufacturing quality module, and a manufacturing performance module. The timing of these next releases -- which are also built on ArchestrA -- was not disclosed.
"Bit by bit, we are injecting more and more ArchestrA technology into existing products," said Mark Davidson, Wonderware's vice president of marketing. "This is a case where we are re-architecting things ... and making sure everything plays together."